The heaviest users — the top 10% — were found to touch their phones almost twice as much, at 5,427 touches per day. Over the course of a year, this accounts for nearly 1 million touches on average, per user.

These interactions involve typing out texts, scrolling through Facebook feeds, turning pages in Kindle books, and much more, all at short and frequent intervals. The research, conducted by dscout, tracked every interaction made by 94 Android users for 24 hours over five consecutive days. Here are the key takeaways from the study:

Users prefer to keep phone sessions on the shorter side with rare cases of long usage times. Average users engaged in 76 separate phone sessions a day, totaling 2.42 hours. Heavy users averaged 132 sessions per day, totaling 3.75 hours. The longer usage times, spent either watching a video on Netflix or reading a book in the Kindle app, were far less preferred to shorter browsing sessions with multiple breaks.

A large portion of interactions are spent within messaging and social apps. On average, users spent 26% of their time on messaging and social media apps, and 10% of their time on internet search browsers. Additionally, Facebook had the most touches with 15% of interactions, native messaging apps followed with 11%, the home screen had 9%, and Chrome had 5%.

Usage time surges at key points during the day. The average number of touches began as soon as participants woke up — around 7 a.m. — and accelerated through the evening. Interestingly, 87% of participants interacted with their devices between midnight and 5 a.m.

Ultimately, the popularity of micro-interactions, particularly within messaging and social apps, provides key insights into user behaviour for businesses. Brands looking to best engage with their users should look to messaging apps and social media to reach out to lapsed customers. This form of engagement will be made increasingly simpler as more companies leverage conversational chatbots to automate the process of interacting with users on these platforms.